Popper, Gretchen, and I had managed to keep their scuffles to a minimum, but it was starting to become a real problem. If those two didn’t start getting along soon, I was going to have to suggest that Gretchen find another mount.
“Raj,” I said. “Actually, I think going with Gretchen is a good idea. If this Sandra’s family is a bunch of polecats, then maybe you can help.”
Bruce Bruce, with what appeared to be a smirk on his bear face, started to say something to Alice, but I held up a finger, silencing him.
“We don’t have time for more arguments. Let’s do this.”
I watched them all file out of the great room, leaving me alone save for a texugo guard who stood silently and unmoving by the entrance.
Dominion Admin> Warning! Your city of Arcanum has been invaded by an opposing faction! (Prince Maghan of the Hobgoblin Riot with 488,281 soldiers.) Your defenders of 1,433 White Jacket soldiers are engaging the enemy.
I sighed. The notifications were a regular thing now. I didn’t need to pull out my map to know where the city of Arcanum was. Denver. The Hobgoblins were cutting a line of death across North America on their march to Harmony. I knew they’d hit Arcanum today. The city had a wall, however, according to Keta, so I expected them to hold out for a couple days at least.
Arcanum, like all the cities in the Dominion, had a tab somewhere deep in my Kingdom Management menu where I could, supposedly, make orders and move defenses around and properly prepare for an invasion. The city’s page was grayed out. The only city I could control was Harmony. If I tried to click on any other city’s management page, I’d receive an error message:
Warning! This City Management page is in beta and is currently unable to be accessed. Please try again later.
“Sorry guys,” I whispered. There was nothing I could do. Later, when the hobgoblins killed all the defenders and the city fell, Arcanum would disappear from my menu.
“Your companions are gone,” Keta said, walking back into the room.
“They are. We’ll give them a few minutes to be on their way, then we’ll go outside and do this,” I said.
“Are you certain? You still wish to do this today, despite what just happened? This is a perilous thing you are asking of me. It is very possible you will be killed. If you die, what will become of the city?”
I paused, considering, weighing my options. “I’m just going to look,” I said finally. “Nothing more. I’ll be in and out.”
What I didn’t add was that I had to get this done now in case we had to flee the city. Leaving the city meant leaving Keta behind, and I couldn’t do this without her.
“Very well, your majesty,” Keta said, bowing. “Meet me on the drawbridge in fifteen minutes.”
I nodded and headed back to my chambers. I needed to get changed.
I didn’t like lying to Gretchen and Popper, but I knew neither of them would approve of this. Or worse, they’d insist on going with me. This was something I had to do on my own.
“Isabella,” I whispered. “I’m coming for you.”
Jonah Note 2
“We can’t do this in the open,” Keta said. “You are the king. People will see, and they will talk.”
We walked the quarter mile from the castle to the abandoned block of buildings. This entire street had been decimated in the blast from the emo-tong’s explosives. We’d asked them for enough of the dynamite to destroy a single building, and the satchel they’d provided ended up being enough to level a whole city block. Raj was lucky to have survived the blast.
I’d decided we weren’t going to rebuild this neighborhood. I knew that many of the NPCs who lived here weren’t going to come back, but I didn’t want to risk somehow allowing Daniels back into the game. If the rogue returned, it would be a disaster.
The inhabitants of Harmony seemed to avoid this block now. We stopped at an abandoned brick pub in the middle of the street. The façade was blackened and crumbling, but the interior of the building had withstood most of the destruction. A sign lay forgotten at the broken entrance, indicating the brothel had once been called “The Mad House.”
I pushed several broken flagons aside and placed my map on the long counter, unfurling it. Beside me, Keta pulled a glowing, yellow Portal scroll from her bag. She also removed a small, gray potion bottle. The liquid fizzed like it was carbonated.
“You are almost finished with this map, no?” Keta asked, running her hand almost reverently over the paper.
I shrugged. I was about as finished as I could be. My cartography skill had stalled out at 11. Each time it ticked up, my mind filled in some of the blanks and I could add to the map. But I was now at the point where I couldn’t see anything new. Instead, I’d been alternating between writing my book and starting new maps. I was currently working on a map of Castle Harmony. Once I ticked up to level 12, I could add more to the world map. I needed to get to the Cartographer guild, but I only knew where one was: in the city of Royston in the country of Crucis, which was this game’s version of England.
“Okay,” Keta said. “Show me exactly where you want to go.”
“Here,” I said, pointing to a small dot.
She peered at the map, frowning. “Are you certain this is where you’ll find her?”
“No,” I said. “It’s why I’m going. I just want to look and see if anything is there.”
It was just a hunch. The odds were good there would be nothing. Gretchen had told me multiple times that the center of Africa was nothing but jungle and beta testing areas for new creatures. There were very few settlements and quests.
“You will have ten minutes. If you are not back, the portal will close, and there is nothing I can do. I will have to rest for several hours after I cast before I can cast again. You do not want to be stuck in that wild place any longer than you have to.”
“Okay,” I said. I touched the hilt of Triple Fang, my three-bladed urumi at my waist. The hilt quivered with excitement. “I’m ready.”
She pushed the bubbling gray vial toward me. “This also lasts ten minutes,” she said. “Powerful magic users or monsters who rely on smell will still be able to detect you.”
I grasped the invisibility potion and popped off the cork with my thumb. I would down it right before I stepped through the portal to Nigeria.
Keta unrolled the Portal scroll and began to chant. I tried to look at the scroll, and a message appeared.
You need a Rune Craft skill of 11 to read this scroll. Your current Rune Craft level is 0.
It took Keta almost a full minute to read the scroll, which I knew was a long time for this game. Just as she read the last line, the scroll burned away in her hands, filling the tavern with the smell of smoke. A glowing, blue doorway, shaped like an almond appeared in the middle of the room. Roiling smoke and flashes of lights obscured the interior of the portal.
“Ten minutes,” Keta said. She bent over, gasping for air.
“Thanks, Keta,” I said. I drank the invisibility potion as I stepped through the magical doorway.
Entering Rafingo.
Achievement unlocked! Travel via portal.
You are invisible!
Achievement unlocked! Become invisible.
I shook my head at the sudden nausea and looked around, trying to gather my bearings. My ears screamed at the unexpected change from near silence to pounding chaos.
I stood in dense, untouched jungle. Thick, curving trees pointed into the sky. A wall of palm fronds, ferns, and long, thin green leaves surrounded me. The temperature was warm, but not as hot as I expected. A driving rain drummed against the leaves, filling the air with the unexpected sound.
A timer appeared in the upper right of my vision, counting down the invisibility potion. The timer, nested just below the timer for the troll quest, would double as the countdown for the portal to close.
Rafingo. Nigeria. But not just anywhere in Nigeria. Middle-of-nowhere Nigeria. I pulled up the minimap, looking to see if anything was here.
&nbs
p; In the real world, where I now stood once existed a small village called Akilaiya. I was about 120 miles northeast of Lagos. This place was where Isabella’s mom grew up. At least that’s what she had told me. Half the shit she had said was a lie, but I suspected this part was probably genuine. Isabella had a romanticized view of this place. She claimed she had visited it once as a child. She’d said if the world wasn’t dying, it’s where she’d have lived out her retirement.
I’d only seen pictures of the real version. The place was beautiful, but it was very poor, surrounded by thick jungle. Most of the homes were nothing more than basic shacks. I recalled the map I had drawn of the village for her after our first date. My hands brushed the watch in my pocket. I remembered the compass Isabella had given me.
Had she given gifts to the others? The thought hurt. Why do you care? It was all a lie.
I couldn’t help but wonder how much she’d told me was real. She’d been obsessed with Nigeria, her mother’s homeland. She loved old-school horror movies. She had a digital collection of thousands of them. She had a thing for hauntings and body horror, which always gave me the creeps. The gorier, the better. She’d made me watch the dozen-plus Saw movies and the Hellraiser ones, too. She also loved both classical music and the blues.
All that stuff was real. It had to be. She knew so much about all of them. Where did the real end and the fake begin?
There was nothing here. On the map, I saw no features other than hundreds of pink dots, representing non-aggressive animals, and a few red ones representing either dangerous animals or monsters.
I sighed. She wasn’t here. “Damn you, Waldo,” I muttered. The AI knew where she was. He knew where all the awake players were, but he refused to tell me. Identifying the location of Hospital Corpsman Isabella Farooqi is not conducive to you completing your mission, Waldo had said when I demanded he (it?) tell me where she was. I lifted my middle finger to the sky and flipped the all-seeing AI off.
A few of the red dots were worryingly close. I unfurled Triple Fang from my waist and held the blade ready in my hand. The dexterity boost coursed through me. I mentally clicked off the automatic Enflame enchantment. I didn’t know if my invisibility enchantment obscured the flaming blades or not, and I didn’t want to risk it. I looked about nervously. This weapon was unstoppable in an open area. While I could use, and had been practicing with, it in more cramped quarters, the almost nine-foot length was a detriment in a place like this, surrounded by foliage. The flexible blades could easily slice through most anything save metal and rock, but only once I got them spinning up to full speed.
I took a few steps toward what looked like a game trail snaking through the woods. The minimap helpfully placed a purple waypoint indicating where the portal stood. I wanted to explore a little bit, but not too far. Gretchen and Popper had both mentioned dozens of times this area was for expert-level players only. I trudged through the wet foliage toward the trail, my feet catching on thick vines. Above, I caught glimpse of a pair of white-faced monkeys swinging through the trees. Their dots were pink, so they were no threat.
I broke through onto the trail, and the moment I did, the minimap’s visible area widened a couple hundred meters in every direction.
I stared at the shape of the castle on the map for several moments before I realized what I was looking at.
The structure stood about a quarter of a mile away, due north of my current position, right at the end of this path. A castle? What the hell was a castle doing here in the middle of nowhere? It was probably a dungeon, I decided. I had six minutes left, so I wouldn’t be able to investigate. I walked about twenty feet forward, entering a small clearing, which opened up the map just a bit further.
There, at the edge of my vision, I saw it. Two blue dots just inside the castle. My heart stuttered. Blue dots. Players. Not NPCs. These were two of the 13 players awake in this world.
Holy shit. I was right. I knew it. I fucking knew it. This was her base. She’d somehow built a castle here in the middle of nowhere, a place no sane person would ever look, unless it was someone who knew her well.
The orange dot of a player’s pet rocketed out of the front of the castle, headed right at me. In the distance, even over the pounding of the rain, I could hear the monster’s bellow.
“What the fuck?” I said. How’d it detect me? Whatever it was, it was fast. And big, I realized with horror, looking at the size of the dot on the map. I remembered Sabatina, the hermit crab boat. This thing was bigger, the biggest living thing I’d ever seen. And it was someone’s pet? How was that even possible?
I didn’t want to stick around to find out. I turned to run. I had plans for Isabella and her crew, but now wasn’t the time. I just wanted to find her. I cursed my luck. I hadn’t expected to be discovered.
I stopped dead. Coming up the path were a group of about thirty gazelle-headed humanoids. They trotted up the trail toward the castle, using some sort of stealth magic that camouflaged their presence. It didn’t appear as if they’d noticed me. Their red dots appeared one by one on the map as I noticed them.
Each of the short, furry monsters sported a pair of four-foot horns that arced from their foreheads. Their horns were easily as long as the beasts were tall. They wore hide armor, heaped liberally over their furry shoulders.
Not gazelles. Oryx. I remembered watching a show on the real version of these things. There were lots of different kinds, but most of the earth versions were recently extinct, hunted to death for their horns. The last living example of one of the species had been murdered in a zoo after someone broke through security and shot it, stealing its horns.
These guys held weapons that were nothing more than sticks with what appeared to be lion’s claws affixed to the end. They moved quickly, but they were silent, intent on their purpose.
They were headed for the castle, I realized. On the map, the orange dot would be on all of us in seconds. I had to act now.
Without weighing the pros and cons of announcing my presence, I lit and spun up my blades, rushing toward them. My blades felt encumbered and sluggish as I forced them into their pattern. Leaves and palm fronds from either side of the path exploded as I cut through them. The flaming blades remained invisible, but steam filled the air where the rain fell against the fire, giving the appearance of some sort of mist creature.
The creatures crashed to a stop and bleated with surprise at the sight of invisible death descending upon them. They swung wildly with their claw sticks as I jumped into their midst. Grayed-out notifications started to scroll.
I cried with pain as a claw ripped across my face. A lucky shot, but it hurt bad. My vision flashed red. I pushed through several of the beasts, and I would have stumbled if my dexterity wasn’t so high.
I passed through the back of the platoon of oryx just as quickly as I had charged.
Experience earned! Experience earned!
My blades were a tangled mess. I pulled hard, cutting through another few of the oryx beasts, who continued to bleat and howl with confusion. Several lay dead, and two more appeared to have lost limbs, though they remained on their feet. They looked at each other in confusion, not understanding what had just happened.
Experience earned! Experience earned!
You have gained a level!
You have received a training token.
You are now level 35.
What the hell? I quickly pulled up my messages. I’d barely just made it to level 34.
“Holy crap,” I muttered. Each one of those oryx monsters was worth 2,000 experience each. That was an insane amount of experience for a single monster, and it seemed out of whack with their strength. It had to be because we were in such a dangerous area. Great, how am I going to explain to Gretchen and Popper how I did this?
These are flavorsome nuggets.
Yesss, master. More of these meaty beasts. We need to taste…
My sword’s praise was cut short by the entrance of the dinosaur.
I scrambled aw
ay in horror as a goddamned brontosaurus slammed into the path and began to tear the oryx creatures into shreds.
The monster had to be 150 feet long and 30 feet high. This wasn’t a dragon. It was a dinosaur straight out of a Jurassic Park movie, only bigger. The gray beast’s neck, thick like a train car, seemed to last forever. Its massive mouth scooped up the oryx beasts four at a time, cutting them in half.
Behind on the map, I now saw five blue dots rushing forward from the castle. Five. One of them was Isabella. Holy shit. Here she was.
It was time to go.
I now knew what had happened. The pet dinosaur thing hadn’t detected me. It had somehow seen the oryx monsters, and it was coming out to attack them. This was a wild place, not meant to be settled. I imagined the attacks were probably regular, maybe even multiple times a day.
I looked at the roaring monstrosity one more time. It had eaten most of the creatures already, but it seemed to be corralling the remaining. Was it keeping them alive so the other players could kill them? I turned and jogged back toward the portal. I had about a minute left.
I reached the portal, which was flickering ominously. As I jumped through, I wondered if that was what Isabella and her crew did all day. They trained. They killed high-experience monsters. I wasn’t certain how long they’d been in-game, but I knew it had to be as long as Daniels, maybe as long as Smallthunder, who’d been awake for 1,500 years. If that was the case, what the hell level were they by now?
Jonah Note 3
The notification came as I walked back from the druid council tree. They knew of abbot fruit, and they even had seeds that would allow me to grow the vine it grew upon, but I didn’t have time for that. Larus had also struck out with the light clerics, though they would be able to convert the fruit into a salve. Hopefully Popper would have luck with the emo-tong alchemists.
Quest Update: Missing Maps.
Now you’ve discovered the culprits behind the kidnapping, head to Castellane to confront Chief Musa, the hobgoblin warlord at Riot Castle to rescue Sandra the Learnt.
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure Page 3
